We need not analyse whether the wings of Flight 77 could have fitted into
the pre-collapse hole in the Pentagon facade. It does not matter whether a
wanabee pilot - whose flying skills were so poor that he was refused
permission to hire a Cessna in August 2001 - developed the skills of a
crack fighter pilot after a few weeks' flight simulator training, managing
to steer a Boeing 757 a few feet above the Pentagon lawn at over 500 mph
after descending 7000 feet in 150 seconds and making a sharp 270 degree turn
pulling high Gs on his jet flying debut. It is untenable that in 2001 with
the ubiquitous security camera such a feature of modern life at shopping
malls, gas stations, office and apartment blocks, airports, etc, and
employed to tax "speeding" motorists, the national HQ of the world's
greatest military power did not have security cameras recording events on
its west wing. Indeed, cameras from a gas station and a hotel captured the
impact with the Pentagon, but the tapes were confiscated within minutes by
the FBI. In fact, the official story now admits that photos were taken by a
Pentagon security camera.
The problem with the five frames of the "Pentagon security camera" record
of the Flight 77 impact is that none of them show a Boeing 757 about to
strike the Pentagon facade. The authorities claimed that the security
camera frame rate was 100 frames per second. Let us suppose the frame rate
was only 10 frames per second, and that the impact speed of Flight 77 was as
high as 780 fps or 530 mph, the figure stated by Civil Engineering Magazine,
Feb 2003. In 1/10 second, the plane would travel 78 feet. Thus, there
should exist a frame showing the nose of a 757-200 in AA colours within 78
feet of striking the Pentagon facade, i.e. within half a length of a Boeing
757-200. Given that the actual frame rate was likely to be considerably
higher, the final pre-impact frame would probably have the nose well within
25 feet of the wall. In addition, the plane was supposed to be approaching
at a 45 degree angle, so the gap from nose to wall and the slightly rotated
aircraft length are foreshortened by cos[(angle of impact from the
perpendicular) - (angle of camera slight inclination from parallel to
facade)] which makes it even easier to fit a good view of Flight 77 in the
frame.
It took six months and the release of French books about "Pentagate" before
the authorities grudgingly released the five frames of "evidence". If the
events occurred as advertised, with an AA Boeing 757 involved, video
evidence clearly showing the plane would exist and would have been made
available. By 2004, video evidence had still not been publicised. Thus,
the Pentagon incident was carried out in such a way that some witnesses
would find the official story plausible, but real-time video evidence would
disprove it. Ergo, an AA Boeing 757 did not strike the Pentagon on 9/11.
In the previous section, it was just - but barely - credible that the
bungling alphabet spy agencies, despite their massive multi-billion dollar
budgets, might have been so incompetent that they failed to stop terrorist
hijackers, and then made up evidence to cover themselves. In the case of
the Pentagon, we would need to propose that, coincidentally, the CCTV system
failed at the exact time of the Flight 77 impact, incompetent FBI operatives
lost both the garage and hotel videos, and the phoney five "video frames"
were faked months later in a crude attempt to cover up these failures.
The Pentagon incident occurred more than 70 minutes after the first
"hijacking" warning signs, and 35 minutes after two planes had already hit
the WTC in a co-ordinated terrorist attack. Consequently, CCTV downtime due
to routine maintenance is not an acceptable explanation. An army division
would not continue to dismantle and clean all of its guns, for example, when
the enemy had just been sighted advancing on the brow of the next hill. Let
us suppose that downtime of all Pentagon west wing CCTV cameras due to
catastrophic failure occurs for about five hours every five years; thus the
probability of failure at any given time is 1 in 8,766. If we suppose that
the chance of a "Jacques Clouseau" style operative losing or destroying two
critically important packages is 1 in 2,000, the probability for total CCTV
failure and two associated package losses is 1 in 17.532 million.
In the "we know who did it" vs revised incompetence BLIARS in the last
section, the former was correlated with very low probability anomalies or
impossible absurdities. With the Pentagon events, the revised BLIARS is
also positively correlated with the improbable anomalies, and we need a new
explanation to account for the anomalies. We are looking for probabilities
under 1 in 1,000 and ideally under 1 in 10,000, so the CCTV failure and
package losses are certainly a possibility for our final set of events
highly correlated with the truth-values of BLIARS vs Snowball. If we count
them as a single event, they are particularly relevant. It is reasonable to
do this, since if BLIARS is true then both hardware failure and software
losses were prerequisites of the single event "no genuine video of Flight
77 available for publishing; phoney frames were faked".
To return briefly to the question of the missing wings, we cannot safely
conclude that the wings would not have been shredded into confetti. Let's
suppose the reinforced concrete Pentagon facade is stronger than the wings,
which fail to smash their way more than a cm into the concrete. Flight 77's
impact speed, at 780 fps or 237.7 m/s should be multiplied by cos (45
degrees), the angle of impact, obtaining 168.1 m/s. We should lower this
further to allow for some deceleration as the fuselage punches through the
first two or three columns. Let's make it 100 m/s.
In order to estimate the stress felt by the wings on impact, let's initially
suppose that they are not hollow, disregard the engines, and imagine the
thin edge perfectly lined up with the facade on impact. Assuming the wing
deceleration occurs over a centimetre, from a = (v^2 - u^2) / (2 * x) we
have (0 - 100 ^ 2) / 0.02 = -500,000 m/s^2, or in excess of 50,000g.
The force required to decelerate each wing is linearly related to the mass,
yet the stress pressure is inversely related to the impacting surface area
which is itself linearly related to the mass. Consequently, for a solid
wing, the stress is only a function of the density and depth of the wing,
rather than the impacting area. The wings taper off towards the tips, and
the average depth (the dimension along the length of the plane and
perpendicular with the facade) is about 4 metres. So for every square metre
cross-section impacting with the Pentagon, it would correspond to an average
volume of 4 m^3 of aluminum, and a mass of 4 * 2580 kg/m^3 = 10,320 kg. To
obtain the associated force, we multiply this by the deceleration:
10,320 * 500,000 = 5.16 * 10 ^ 9 newtons. Hence, the stress pressure on
impact is 5.16 * 10 ^ 9 N/m^2 = 5160 MPa or 748 ksi (748,000 psi). This is
more than 22 times the yield strength of high grade aluminum at some 34,000
psi, or 17 times the ultimate strength.
The leading edge of the wings is tapered back about 30 degrees, so with the
plane impacting at 45 degrees, the right wingtip hits first (provided it
wasn't already knocked off by lightposts, etc) with the wing's leading edge
hitting at a 15 degree angle. The engine starts punching its way through at
almost the same time as the wingtip impacts; we have already allowed for
plenty of deceleration. Then the left wing leading edge strikes at a 75
degree angle. A solid column 4m long, with 1m^2 cross-section striking
neatly parallel to the facade, experiences a stress many times the yield
strength as above, after allowing for deceleration and the incoming angle.
But the wing is not a solid block - a lower mass and stress but easier to
break - and does not take the impact on a frontal cross-section whose area
is relatively high in relation to its volume. The leading edge of the wing
is much thinner than the average 4m front to back wing depth. Most of the
wing material is striking the facade upon a very small cross-sectional area
with the material extending lengthwise at various angles. Thus, with the
stress experienced being substantially in excess of the yield or ultimate
strength, conditions are conducive to the aluminum crumpling and
fragmenting, quite possibly into pieces too small to be shown in photos.